THE ISLAND; A Live Wire At the Top Of LIPA

By Robin Finn

Published: July 30, 2006

AS soon as the lights went out, and stayed out, in Queens two weeks ago, Richard M. Kessel, the man at the helm of the Long Island Power Authority, had an epiphany of the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I sort. Mr. Kessel, known as Richie, imagined himself in the sticky shoes of Consolidated Edison's president, Kevin Burke: 100,000 paying customers sweating in the dark, courtesy of a blackout resulting from an equipment failure exacerbated by a judgment call at the top.

Cringe city.

''I knew right away that if that were us, I'd be lucky if I got a job at the local deli slicing Boar's Head,'' says Mr. Kessel, whose Sumo-wrestler girth explains a tendency toward food-centricity. ''I'm not sure I would have handled it the same way as Con Ed. I'm not going to hide under my desk if something goes wrong.'' Assuming he'd even fit under his desk. He says he has shed 50 pounds thanks to a Weight Watchers regimen, but has another 50 to go. Maybe. Giving up chocolate -- his main source of caffeinated energy kilowatts -- two days a week is a heartbreaker.

''One of the nice things about being a big guy is that I can absorb a lot of blame. I'm like a sponge,'' he says. ''But my mantra is, keep the lights on. That's all people really care about. If the lights go out, it destroys Long Island forever.'' Such hyperbolic talk is something Mr. Kessel -- a Nader-esque force who helped kill the Shoreham nuclear plant and the reviled Lilco before his installation here at this publicly-owned utilities company -- is a master at.

''At LIPA, we treat catastrophes or emergencies like Election Day,'' he says. ''You want to win, because if you don't, you're gone.''

Mr. Kessel, 55, has no intention of going until he is certain that, besides building more than a dozen power plants, he has implemented sufficient innovations, like off-shore windmills and the Neptune cable linking the island to cheaper power sources to the south. He says Long Island relies on fossil fuels for roughly 97 percent of its power, making it ''a prisoner of the oil companies.''

''And from an environmental perspective, it stinks,'' he says.

That innovations, and new power plants, spark dissent goes without saying.

''If we stopped every project because there are people who oppose it, believe me, Queens would look like heaven compared to Long Island,'' Mr. Kessel says. ''The same people arguing against windmills are the ones doubling the size of their homes and installing central air and hot tubs.''

Mr. Kessel's home in Merrick has central air, but he rarely flicks the switch. His last appliance purchased? An Energy Star-rated room air-conditioner. He describes his own environmental footprint as average. He drives a LIPA-issued Jeep and shuts off the lights when he leaves the house. His four cats have great night vision.

Mr. Kessel, in Dockers and a striped golf shirt, is fresh off the ferry from Fire Island, where he conducted his yearly sit-down with community leaders and picked up two quarts of Starbucks Mud Pie ice cream. After the lights went out at the height of Fire Island's tourist season a few years ago, he received a lambasting, and LIPA invested in improvements. Not that everybody loves LIPA.

''Hey, if anyone actually loves their utility company, they should probably go see someone,'' Mr. Kessel suggests. He says that as the face of LIPA, he is rarely heckled in public, though come to think of it, he did hear rumblings -- ''Lower my rates!'' -- at a recent Lou Christie concert (he's an oldies freak). He gives hecklers a taste of their own medicine: ''I ask them what they do for a living, and when they say, 'I'm a lawyer,' or 'I'm a painter,' I say, 'Hey, you lower yours, I'll lower mine.' ''

When LIPA raised its rates 20 percent, an escalation Mr. Kessel attributes to post-Hurricane Katrina oil prices, consumers filed a class-action lawsuit. He defends the increase even though ''people became prickly toward me personally.'' He says LIPA has absorbed $900 million in energy costs: ''If we absorbed all the costs, LIPA would be bankrupt by now.'' He hopes its 1.1 million customers notice that there is no rate hike in 2006, guaranteed; and that his salary of $165,000 is hardly that of a client-gouging corporate executive.

As for a recent J. D. Power and Associates survey ranking LIPA next-to-last in customer satisfaction among the nation's 76 largest utilities companies, Mr. Kessel is sanguine. He says LIPA's performance over the last two weeks -- a quick repair of its own shutdowns, the dispatch of crews to assist Con Ed in Queens, the export of voltage to power-stressed states -- trumps the survey.

''The lights stayed on here while everybody around us lost theirs,'' he says. ''That says it all. Who cares what J. D. Power says?''

The phone rings. It's the mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg. Wonderful to be needed.